We’ve added a What we have our eye on section to discuss the release of a promising business card, the Business Advantage Cash Rewards Mastercard® from Bank of America.

Your guide

Taylor Tepper

Cash flow is at the top of any small-business owner’s mind—and a business credit card can be a valuable tool for making sure you pay the bills on time in months when things are tight. (We don’t endorse relying on credit cards as a stopgap, though, as doing so can lead to unmanageable debt.)

We found that small businesses preferred cards with no annual fee, good customer service, a generous credit line, rewards, and low interest rates, so these were the criteria that helped inform our picks.

In addition to talking with industry experts, bank representatives, and customers, Wirecutter Money reviewed survey and government data and sifted through the terms and conditions of 87 cards before deciding on three picks: the best overall small-business card, the best card if you have merely good credit, and the best card if you love travel.

Best overall business credit card

You find a little bit of joy everywhere. American Express is well regarded for its customer service, while the card itself earns solid cash-back rewards in eligible categories of your choosing without charging an annual fee.

What we love

This cash-back card offers strong rewards and commendable customer service without charging an annual fee.

No annual fee

Good rewards rate

Intro 0% APR on purchases for 15 months, then 14.49%-21.49% variable

Ability to spend above your credit limit

What we don’t love

You're well rewarded for purchasing flights with this card—yet a foreign-transaction fee will make you disinclined to bring this card overseas.

Rewards for the 5% and 3% bonus categories are each limited to the first $50,000 in spending per calendar year

Annual Fee

$0

Regular APR

14.49% – 21.49% variable

Intro Bonus

N/A

Recommended Credit

Good to excellent

What we love: This card checks all the boxes for what most small-business owners want in a card, offering no annual fee, excellent customer service, possible access to a flexible credit limit, and a 15 month 0% intro period on purchases.

What we don’t love: Although you can pick airfare purchased directly from airlines or hotel rooms purchased directly from hotels as your 3% category, the 2.7% foreign-transaction fee will put off businesspeople who travel abroad. Meanwhile, you’re capped at $50,000 in spending on the 3% and 5% bonus spending categories (once you hit the cap, your reward rate drops to 1%), which may diminish the appeal for especially high spenders.

Best business card if you have average credit

If you’re not confident you have the credit score to qualify for other picks, consider this new product by Discover. There’s no annual fee, a year of 0% APR on purchases and top-rated customer service.

What we love

A solid earnings rate on all purchases with no cap

First-year rewards are doubled

12 month intro 0% APR, then 15.24% - 23.24% variable

What we don’t love

Annual Fee

$0

Regular APR

15.24% – 23.24% variable

Intro Bonus

Cashback Match™

Recommended Credit

Average to Good

What we love: Discover markets the card as simple—and it is simple. You earn 1.5% on everything you buy (an amount that’s doubled the first year, as with many other Discover cards) without paying an annual fee, and you receive a 12-month 0% intro period for all purchases. Travelers abroad don’t have to worry about foreign-transaction fees.

Discover employs generally looser underwriting standards compared with Amex and Chase, so people with good (around 700 to 720) rather than excellent credit may have a better shot at being approved.

What we don’t love: You don’t earn bonus rewards for business-related expenses (such as office supplies or online advertising), and you won’t find any eye-popping travel credits or discounts on trendy services such as WeWork or ZipRecruiter. Also, this card is not the best overseas companion because Discover isn’t as widely accepted abroad as Visa or Mastercard.

Best business card for travel

If your business has you hopping from one plane to another, consider this pick. You’ll earn extra rewards on a host of other categories besides travel, from landlines to Google ads, and redeem them on Chase’s travel portal for a bonus.

What we love

3x miles on first $150,000 spent on travel, shipping, Internet, cable, phone, and advertisements on social media and search sites; unlimited 1 point per $1 spent elsewhere

What we don’t love

Annual Fee

$95

Regular APR

18.24% – 23.24% variable

Intro Bonus

80,000 Points

Recommended Credit

Good to excellent

What we love: The huge intro bonus, coupled with a variety of travel and nontravel bonus spending, means businesses can save big on plane tickets and the like. A point earned on the Chase Ink Business Preferred℠ card is worth 1.25¢ when you use it to book travel on the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal (meaning, every $1 you spend on travel is worth 3.75¢), but it has the potential to be worth much more if you transfer it to one of the card’s partner loyalty programs (such as United).

What we don’t love: The $95 annual fee is inconvenient, and the card has no intro 0% APR grace period. Chase typically doesn’t score well on customer-satisfaction metrics.

What small businesses care about in a business credit card

Picking a credit card to satisfy all the needs of the more than 30 million American small businesses is impossible, and there will always be trade-offs. For instance, no card delivers the highest travel rewards without charging an annual fee.

A quarter of small businesses regularly carry a balance, while up to half do so from time to time.

About four-fifths of small businesses don’t have any employees, and 71% of those earn less than $100,000 in revenue, according to the 2018 Small Business Credit Survey (PDF) by the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Cleveland, and Richmond.

So we sought common ground. A 2018 survey of 2,000 small-business “decision makers and influencers” for the payment and banking analyst firm Mercator Advisory Group found that they most valued five attributes in a card:

no annual fee

good customer service

a generous credit line

any rewards (more of those surveyed preferred cash back to miles)

a competitive interest rate (APR)

We evaluated 87 small-business credit cards from both big banks and credit unions to determine which one performed best across those five important metrics. When it came to travel rewards, we relaxed the annual-fee prohibition but still preferred cards that didn’t charge triple digits for the privilege of having them in your wallet.

Financing is another major issue—and almost every business needs access to credit.

“Routinely businesses need to juggle around money so they can have quick access to cash and to help cover for cash management issues,” said Karen Augustine, Mercator Advisory Group’s senior manager of primary data services, in an interview.

Who this guide is for

You want to separate your business expenses from those on a personal credit card.

You need high credit limits and some flexibility in paying off your balance.

You don’t want to pay an annual fee.

You enjoy an above-average personal credit score, generally north of 700.

Who this guide isn’t for

You're after a sign-up bonus in particular.

You want to pay hundreds of dollars for access to premium perks such as airport lounges.

Your business has sales north of $2 million to $5 million (at which point you should consider a full-on corporate card).

You’re a sole proprietor or a single-member LLC, and you’re comfortable mixing your personal and business purchases

Why you should trust us

A plethora of sites review credit cards and other financial products, and many of those sites put their own financial interests first. We don’t do that. We exist to recommend the best products to help you live a better life.

In some cases, if you click on a card in one of our guides and you’re approved for the offer, we’ll make money—but those commissions never influence our reporting, our writers, or our editors. And we’ll never make a penny from some of our top picks (for example, the Uber Visa Card, our pick for the best dining rewards card) because we independently found them to be the best regardless of any business relationships. Like all of Wirecutter, we maintain editorial independence from our business operations.

You may not know this, but many sites prominently feature only those credit cards that pay them a commission. We don’t. Our editorial team analyzes most major cards or products (and some not-so-major ones) in a category. (We researched more than 100 cards for our guide to the best balance-transfer cards.)

When you go to a competitor’s site, you’ll often see a never-ending scroll of “best picks.” Many of these publishers charge the banks more money to get their offers higher on the page. Banks have no influence on where we place a card in our guides. You won’t find a “Best Metal Card” in any of our guides, or any such thing that doesn’t matter to you.

Sometimes, banks allow sites to make money off only one version of a card’s offer. For instance, a bank may pay sites a commission only if they highlight a 12-month balance-transfer offer, while offering 15 months directly on its own website. The offers we review and recommend are the best in class, given our research and expertise, whether we get paid or not.

We don’t believe these principles are revolutionary, but they are necessary for us to be able to say that a particular credit card is “the best.”

Best overall business card: SimplyCash® Plus Business Credit Card from American Express

Best overall business credit card

You find a little bit of joy everywhere. American Express is well regarded for its customer service, while the card itself earns solid cash-back rewards in eligible categories of your choosing without charging an annual fee.

What we love

This cash-back card offers strong rewards and commendable customer service without charging an annual fee.

No annual fee

Good rewards rate

Intro 0% APR on purchases for 15 months, then 14.49%-21.49% variable

Ability to spend above your credit limit

What we don’t love

You're well rewarded for purchasing flights with this card—yet a foreign-transaction fee will make you disinclined to bring this card overseas.

Rewards for the 5% and 3% bonus categories are each limited to the first $50,000 in spending per calendar year

Annual Fee

Regular APR

Intro Bonus

Recommended Credit

What makes this card great

We looked for a card that scored well across the five categories we focused on, and the SimplyCash® performed the best.

It doesn’t charge an annual fee, an essential criterion for many small businesses since eking out a profit is a continuous challenge.

The SimplyCash® Plus has a combination of a 0% APR for the first 15 months and a relatively low ongoing APR of 14.49% – 21.49%, a better deal than its closest rivals offer, although carrying a balance could still hurt.

This card could help if you run into a month where your credit limit won’t cover your expenses: American Express’s “buy above your credit limit” feature may allow you to temporarily exceed your cap by a preset amount, depending on your creditworthiness. (Regardless, you should aim to spend no more than 20% to 30% of your credit limit and pay it off in full, just as you would with a personal card. You don’t want your business or personal credit scores to suffer.)

Amex doesn’t charge you a fee for taking advantage of this feature, but when your monthly bill comes due, whatever balance you have that’s above your credit limit gets lumped into your minimum payment. This means you have to deal with repayment straight away.

You also receive cash-back rewards (which were more popular in the Mercator survey than miles) with this card. To start, you net 5% back on office supplies bought in the US and wireless telephone services purchased from US service providers, two categories most small businesses spend money on.

The next cash-back tier is less generous (only 3%) but applies to one category of your choosing from a list of eight, including airfare purchased directly from an airline, US purchases for shipping, US restaurants, and US computer hardware, software, and cloud computing services bought directly from eligible vendors (including Apple, Dell, and Microsoft).

You make your 3% pick within two months of opening the card and can change it once a year during the rewards-enrollment period between December 1 and January 31. (You default into the “U.S. gas station” category if you make no selection; be sure to choose a category that suits your business’s spending, even though it’s inconvenient.)

Everything else earns 1%.

If you want to be rewarded for airfare, you’re better off with our best credit card for travel selection. However, the last three categories in the 3% tier are relevant for a wide variety of businesses. If you wine-and-dine potential clients, for example, you might go with restaurants. Etsy outlets may opt for shipping, while a boutique graphic-artist firm would be more interested in the computer benefit.

Whatever you earn automatically redeems as a statement credit the following month.

Customer service is a tougher nut to crack. We can’t guarantee you’ll have a better experience with one issuer than another, since each individual case is just one data point in millions of transactions.

To gain some perspective, we considered the 2018 J.D. Power U.S. Consumer Satisfaction Survey, as well as various J.D. Power banking surveys, to get a sense of a wide swath of public opinion. Discover and American Express finished in the top two places in the credit card report. (Note: These surveys applied to retail credit card customers, not business customers, but it’s the best proxy we have until J.D. Power releases its first ever business-card survey report later this year.)

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Although occasionally exceeding your credit line can be helpful, if you take advantage of that feature, you need to be sure that you can then make the minimum payment (which includes the amount you went above your limit), or you’ll be subject to the penalty APR—currently 29.99%—on your entire balance.

And if you miss two payments in 12 months, if you don’t pay your minimum payment when it’s due, or if one of your payments is returned, the 29.99% penalty APR kicks in for at least 12 months and may apply to any existing or future balances you carry.

Not making your minimum payment on that billing statement results in your forfeiting your cash back. (Although our other picks strip away rewards if your account closes, which can happen if you consistently fail to pay your bill, none are as strict with their terms and conditions. Always pay at least your minimum, even if you have to carry a balance from time to time.)

The SimplyCash disappointingly charges a 2.7% foreign-transaction fee, which contrasts with the fact that it also offers travel-specific rewards. American Express isn’t accepted as widely as Visa or Mastercard in the US or abroad, and you earn rewards only on US purchases.

We’re less concerned about the lack of a sign-up bonus. For most people, a credit card means a long-term relationship, so it’s better to more heavily weigh ongoing rewards. However, the SimplyCash’s cap of $50,000 each on the 5% and 3% bonus categories makes this card less appealing.

The vast majority of small businesses may not hit that figure, though. A generous credit limit is generally anything over $10,000, Mercator analyst Brian Kelley said. If you use up the recommended 30% of your credit limit each month, you’d spend about $36,000 a year, well within Amex’s cap.

Best business card for good (not great) credit: Discover it® Business

Best business card if you have average credit

If you’re not confident you have the credit score to qualify for other picks, consider this new product by Discover. There’s no annual fee, a year of 0% APR on purchases and top-rated customer service.

What we don’t love

Annual Fee

$0

Regular APR

15.24% – 23.24% variable

Intro Bonus

Cashback Match™

Recommended Credit

Average to Good

What makes this card great

Discover, according to Philadelphia Fed senior research fellow Larry Santucci, tends to extend credit to applicants farther down the credit-score ladder (around 700 to 720), although your chance of getting approved falls with major blemishes on your report such as a series of late payments or a lack of credit history.

Many people who apply for a business card, especially their first one, lack an established business credit history to fall back on. So issuers look at your personal creditworthiness, in addition to the health of your business, before approving you for a card, according to Mike Strathman, lending manager for Wells Fargo Small Business Lending.

The average FICO score hovers around 700, which means many fledgling entrepreneurs may not qualify for our top overall pick or the best travel card, as those cards typically require you to have very good or excellent credit (a FICO score of 740-plus).

The Discover it® Business Card, though, is a good card in its own right, and it delivers well on the aspects of a business card we focused on during our research.

You earn 1.5% cash back on everything you buy (you can redeem your rewards as a statement credit or a direct deposit), and the first-year rewards are doubled. As a result, the card essentially offers 3% on all purchases in the first year (a cash-back rate you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere) before reverting to 1.5%.

This card is especially appealing if you don’t want to commit to a particular category, such as office supplies or restaurants, to earn rewards.

Discover placed first in the J.D. Power survey thanks in part to a customer-service operation based entirely in the US. (Discover scores well on consumer satisfaction across the board, not specifically for this card.) You receive a replacement for a lost or stolen card overnight, and there’s no foreign-transaction fee should you travel overseas.

On top of all that, this card compares favorably to two other business cards that offer similar terms, the Ink Business Unlimited℠ Credit Card and the Spark® Cash Select from Capital One®.

You need to be securely in the superprime range (with a FICO score around 740 or above) to have a chance to qualify for the Chase Ink card, though, and if that’s you, we believe you’re better off with our American Express SimplyCash® Plus pick.

Both the Discover it® Business and the Capital One Spark Cash® Select have no annual fee and net you 1.5% on everything. But Discover doesn’t charge a penalty APR if you’re late on a payment, waives the first late-payment fee, and extends 12 months of 0% interest on purchases after you sign up—all of which address the key factors we looked for in a business credit card, and none of which are features that the Spark Cash® Select offers.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Discover it® Business has no wow factor: It has no glaring flaws but also offers few standout attributes.

In addition, it’s not a great card to bring overseas because Discover isn’t as widely accepted as Mastercard and Visa—but if you were to use it abroad, you wouldn’t get dinged with a foreign-transaction fee.

Best business card for travel: Chase Ink Business Preferred℠

Best business card for travel

If your business has you hopping from one plane to another, consider this pick. You’ll earn extra rewards on a host of other categories besides travel, from landlines to Google ads, and redeem them on Chase’s travel portal for a bonus.

What we love

3x miles on first $150,000 spent on travel, shipping, Internet, cable, phone, and advertisements on social media and search sites; unlimited 1 point per $1 spent elsewhere

What we don’t love

Annual Fee

$95

Regular APR

18.24% – 23.24% variable

Intro Bonus

80,000 Points

Recommended Credit

Good to excellent

What makes this card great

Travel rewards are the biggest attraction of this card. It makes sense only if you’re on the road or in the air all the time and you want to redeem your points for cheaper flights or hotel stays. Otherwise, check out the SimplyCash® Plus.

You earn 3x points on the first $150,000 total you spend on four categories (travel; shipping purchases; Internet, cable, and phone services; and search and social-media advertising purchases) and 1x point on all else.

A single point, when you redeem it on Chase’s Expedia-like travel portal, is worth 1.25¢. Since you receive 3x points for a dollar spent on travel, you earn 3.75¢, or more than double what you receive from the Discover it® Business Card.

The value of that point may be worth more if you transfer it to a partner loyalty program, such as that of United, and redeem it for a long-haul flight.

You also earn 80,000 points if you spend $5,000 within three months of opening the card, and they’re worth at least $1,000 if you use them on the Chase portal (or perhaps more if you transfer them).

To get a sense of what these numbers may mean for you, here’s a comparison of the Chase Ink Business Preferred, the Spark® Miles from Capital One, and the American Express Blue Business Plus.

If you were to spend $50,000 a year for five years ($25,000 on nontravel items and $25,000 on travel), you’d earn:

Chase Ink Business Preferred℠: $6,775

Spark® Miles from Capital One®: $5,120

American Express Blue Business℠ Plus: $5,000

Our calculations factor in any applicable annual fees. The Blue Business Plus doesn’t have an annual fee, making it superior to the Ink Business Preferred in this regard. However, the Blue Business Plus charges foreign-transaction fees, which is a nonstarter for a travel card. The Ink Business Preferred doesn’t charge such fees, so you can consider bringing it on international trips.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Although the Ink delivers on travel rewards, it isn’t particularly competitive on any other front. The $95 annual fee, a no-go for what we want in an overall top pick, isn’t waived the first year (unlike with the Spark® Miles), and its purchase APR is higher than that of the Discover it® Business card.

The Ink offers no mechanism to extend your credit limit, as the SimplyCash® Plus does, and Chase lands in the middle ranks in the J.D. Power survey of customer satisfaction.

In the end, only travel-happy businesses should consider it.

What we have our eye on: Business Advantage Cash Rewards Mastercard® from Bank of America

Bank of America recently improved its Business Advantage Cash Rewards Mastercard® credit card, making it much more compelling especially for Bank of America customers. We’ll monitor the card over the next few months before deciding whether to make it a pick.

The Cash Rewards card still charges no annual fee—an essential for most business credit cards, in our eyes—and now gives a $300 intro bonus (a 50% improvement over the previous $200 bonus) once you spend $3,000 within 90 days of opening the account.

The cash-back rewards on the Cash Rewards—Bank of America’s marketing department leaves nothing to the imagination when it comes to naming—are also enhanced. You now earn 3% back on one of six categories of your choosing and 2% on dining for up to the first $50,000 in combined spending in those areas. The six categories are gas stations, office-supply stores, travel, TV/telecom and wireless, computer services, and business consulting services. If you forgo a selection, you default to gas, but you can switch your category choice at the beginning of each month on the app or website. All other spending nets 1%.

And then there’s the relationship bonus, a nifty perk we especially love seeing from cards in our cash-back cards guide. If you have $100,000 in an eligible Bank of America bank account (or a Merrill Edge and Merrill Lynch business investment account), you receive a 75% bonus on each purchase, turning the 3% category of your choice into a 5.25% category. (Dining rises to 3.5% and everything else goes to 1.75%.) If you lack a pile that steep, you can earn a smaller bonus (50%) with $50,000, and a smaller one still (25%) with $20,000.

Nevertheless, you can earn more rewards with our top overall pick, and Bank of America hasn’t fared as well as American Express or Discover on customer satisfaction surveys, an important metric for business customers. But the Cash Rewards card is doing enough to at least enter the conversation.

Do you even need a business credit card?

You have no reason to get a business credit card if you don’t believe it’ll make your life simpler or improve your finances.

Millennial-run businesses are less likely to apply for a business credit card than those led by older bosses, according to the Mercator report, and 61% of all institutions Mercator surveyed said they used a business credit card in 2018, down 10 percentage points from the previous year. And that’s looking at firms selling $500,000 to $2 million worth of stuff.

There’s no one answer as to whether you need a business card, but the following discussion should help you make a decision.

Are you operating a sole proprietorship?

About 70 percent of US businesses are sole proprietorships, which is kind of the default legal status if you do business and don’t incorporate. Essentially your business assets and your personal assets are treated as the same, so if your business goes belly-up, you owe the creditors. It’s all on you.

If you operate a sole proprietorship, applying for a business credit card can make a lot of sense for you. Having a card designated for your business expenses can make it easier for you to mind your p’s and q’s come tax time. But that card doesn’t have to be a business card.

“Having a separate credit card that is used only for the business, whether it's technically a business card or a personal card, will definitely simplify record-keeping,” said St. Louis–based CPA and Oblivious Investor blog author Mike Piper. “When preparing Schedule C [the tax form for profits and loss on business income], it's going to be much faster and easier if all of the business-related expenses are in one place, rather than having to go through all of the person's or family's spending for the year, to pick out the business-related expenses.”

You can download your expenses from our three picks into bookkeeping software, such as Quicken, pretty easily.

A business card also offers other advantages for a sole proprietorship. You have access to quick financing should an emergency expense pop up or you run low on cash. Our pick, the American Express SimplyCash® Plus, can allow you to exceed your credit limit and earns rewards that can make operating your business less expensive. If you plan on eventually growing your business and incorporating, a business card may help you build your business credit profile with the three major business-rating agencies: Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, and Experian.

What if you own an incorporated business?

There’s a strong case for obtaining a business card for an incorporated business—although, again, we can’t explicitly answer this question for you in particular as each situation is different.

Since these types of businesses are distinct from the owner or owners, you have to avoid mixing up personal and business expenses. “Keeping finances separate keeps things much simpler, avoids unintended tax consequences, and is likely better from a liability protection perspective,” Piper said.

In addition, with a business card, you can issue employee cards and set spending limits (which our picks let you do for free), and you have the potential to build up your business creditworthiness so you can more easily qualify for a loan down the road.

You might also garner a larger credit line. According to Jenn Garbach, head of brand and marketing for Capital One Small Business Card, Capital One figures out how much to lend by checking out your “business credit report, which looks at factors like payment history, credit utilization, and overall business standing related to public records.”

Capital One’s newly launched Business CreditWise, which uses data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, lets you monitor your business credit report at no cost.